If revenge is a dish best served cold, then the fresh-faced recruits of the Peshmerga Force for Women cannot wait for the Kurdish winter to set in. That's when they believe a US attack on Iraq will happen, allowing them to put into practice all they've learned at the training camp for peshmerga - meaning those who face death - outside the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah in the self-rule area of northern Iraq.

At the academy, run by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, 20 young women are being schooled in the arts of attack, ambush and sabotage, and learning to use Soviet-era weapons. Soon they hope to apply these arts of war against the regime held responsible for the murders and disappearances of their loved ones.

"Men get the full force of the dictatorship's brutality in this country, but women end up suffering the results," said Shams Mahmoud, a commander of the women's force, which was established six years ago and now boasts more than 300 fighters.

"There is barely a woman in Iraq whose husband, brother, son or family member has not suffered or been killed at the hands of this regime. My job is to teach them how to look after themselves, and how to fight to liberate this country.

"It doesn't matter how long it takes, I will practise until I am the best shot in Iraq," says Layla, 25, holding a sniper's rifle. "I know that we're still a male-dominated society, but women also make good peshmergas. We are just as brave as the men."

Layla's family hails from Kirkuk, the predominantly Kurdish city that lies in government-controlled territory about an hour's drive from the self-rule area. Six years ago her brother, Meriwan, was taken from their house by Iraqi mukhabarat (secret police). He is still missing, presumed dead.

Rebel missions

Before the Kurdish uprising of 1991 when the self-rule area was established, Layla explains, peshmerga women were those who accompanied their husbands on their rebel missions in the mountains. Their function was not to fight but to cook, build camps, take care of the wounded and carry munitions and messages. Now, she says, Kurdish women are advancing on all fronts.

"We should be active players in building our future. Even if that means fighting alongside our men - there should be no discrimination."

The peshmerga enjoy near mythical status in Kurdish society. During numerous rebellions against successive regimes in Baghdad they have been the Kurds' first and last line of defence, drawing on their legendary hardiness and intimate knowledge of the peaks and valleys of the Zagros mountains.

Today's peshmerga, however, have come down from the mountains and swapped their baggy trousers and bandoliers for green combat fatigues and a more conventional military approach. Along with practice on the few big guns in Kurdish hands, recruits at the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's (PUK) military academy learn maths, computer science and history, as well as tactical awareness and strategy.

Service in the peshmerga force is voluntary and morale appears high. Despite a lack of heavy weaponry the peshmerga were "ready and willing for action", said Mustafa Sayid Khadir, deputy commander-in-chief of peshmerga forces for the PUK. Led by Jalal Talabani, the PUK has around 25,000 troops under its command, while Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic party, which administers the western part of the Kurdish enclave from Irbil, claims around 35,000. Both groups say their ranks could swell with the addition of some 40,000 irregulars.

The Kurdish forces represent the only armed opposition presence on the ground in Iraq, and clearly want to be taken seriously, though they recognise that they would be no match in a head-to-head with Saddam's tanks or helicopter gunships.

"At the moment, we're in the dark [about US plans]," says Khadir. "But we can play an even more effective role than the Northern Alliance did in Afghanistan. We are much more organised than the Northern Alliance were, and we have more experience. But we need more resources."

To his evident frustration, the US has been reluctant to equip the Kurds with modern weaponry. He reels off a shopping list of arms and equipment, including gas masks and chemical weapons suits he wishes the Americans would provide.

Their present arsenal consists mainly of vintage Kalashnikovs, heavy machine-guns and Katyusha rockets seized from the Iraqis in the uprising that followed the end of the Gulf war. In addition, says Khadir, Kurds smuggle in some guns from the black market in Iran or buy munitions from impoverished and disaffected Iraqi soldiers stationed near the Kurdish zone.

The women's peshmerga force has already tasted frontline combat in battles against Ansar al-Islam, an extreme Kurdish Islamist group with suspected links to al-Qaida which occupies a string of villages on the edge of PUK-controlled territory on the border with Iran. "Thankfully," Layla says, "we have not yet had any martyrs."